John Tierney has some thoughts on, and from Freeman Dyson, that seem appropriate to last night’s nonsense:
The disagreement about values may be described in an over-simplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tunafish may flourish, is likewise evil. Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.
The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity. The humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.
Like Tierney, I am firmly in Freeman’s camp.
Though humanity, Gaia is in the process of bringing Life to the rest of a dead solar system. Even though it was only for a few weekends 4 decades ago, we brought life to the Moon, something Nature never could manage in 4.5 billion years. And it appears we’ll have to do the same for Mars and Europa and Titan and everywhere else.
Humanity is Gaia’s reproductive system. The Green Left wants to keep us from spreading life around. Then again, the Left in general treats human abortion as some sort of Holy Sacrament, so it’s consistent that they want to abort Gaia’s offspring.
Mr. Tierney’s summary does a superb job in showing how conservative and reactionary (as the words are properly understood) these Green/Red innumerates are.
There is a third alternative worldview: Christian theism. This third course says that neither nature nor man is god. Yet man is special in all of creation because he was created in the image of the one true God. God is the master of all things. He has made us stewards of his creation and given us dominion over it. In humility we wield the gifts of strength and intelligence that he has given us. As his stewards we have a responsibility to care for the world. More importantly, however, we have a special duty to use the God-given resources of this world to care for our fellow man, and to honor God in all that we do.
Bill,
In practice Christian theism and Humanism lead to most of the same outcomes. Corner cases differ, but not the big picture stuff. That’s there Christianity/Humanists differ from the Left, as both Christians and Humanists see humanity as a Good Thing rather than part of the problem.
Perhaps, Brock, but there is a native humility to Christian theism that is sometimes lacking in humanism. By grounding our worldview in the transcendent we are better able to resist the temptations of power over man and nature.
Bill Hensley says: By grounding our worldview in the transcendent we are better able to resist the temptations of power over man and nature.
I submit that what Thomas Sowell calls the Tragic Vision is a more robust path to resisting these temptations than Christian theism.
It is certainly encouraging when humanists recognize the sinfulness of human nature. The elements still lacking, which theism provides, are an extrinsic moral standard and the accountability to God for our actions.
The Tragic Vision does not recognize the “sinfulness of human nature”; self-flagellation is not productive. The Tragic Vision recognizes the fallibility of humans, our propensity to think we know more than we do, and our misguided belief in the perfectibility of man.
In engineering terms, we know that humans are fallible, and in fact demonstrably fail a significant amount of the time, so we had better plan for that and make sure that our institutions have lots of redundancy, that we make critical judgments about our input data based on reality instead of wishful thinking, that we recognize that “better” is often the enemy of “good enough”.
we know that humans are fallible, and in fact demonstrably fail a significant amount of the time, so we had better plan for that and make sure that our institutions have lots of redundancy
So the administrations desire to centralize control of the economy is an example of increasing the fragility of the system.
Raoul,
It may not have been just for a few weekends four decades ago. There is probably life on the moon right now – living in the garbage and feces left by the astronauts. I’ll include a quote from Don Brownlee below. And, if you’ll a brief name drop, I have a fun memory of briefly joking about this very subject with Freeman Dyson himself.
” Even though it’s been three decades, there is a good chance that hearty bacteria live and reproduce inside encapsulated small damp places and survive the monthly cycles of heat and cold as well as the effects of solar flares, ultraviolet light, and hard vacuum. If born-on-the-moon organisms are not living in food scraps (and worse) there are probably dormant terrestrial organisms trapped inside vast numbers of components – wire harnesses and tape interfaces that are parts of the lunar lander, back packs, surface experiments, rover, etc. ” — Don Brownlee